Thus many Christian writers have sought to throw ridicule upon the Eleusinia. But we must remember, that, to Greece, throughout her whole history, they presented a well-defined system of faith,--that, essentially, they even served the function of a church by their inherent idea of divine discipline and purification and the hope which they ever held out of future resurrection and glory. Why, then, you ask, if they were so pure and full of meaning, why was not such a man as Socrates one of the Initiated? The reason, reader, was simply this: What the Eleusinia furnished to Greece, that Socrates furnished to himself. That man who could stand stock-still a whole day, lost in silent contemplation, what was the need to him of the Eleusinian veil? The most self-sufficient man in all Greece, who could find the way directly to himself and to the mystery and responsibility of his own will without the medium of external rites, to whom there were the ever-present intimations of his strange Divinity,--what need to him of the Eleusinian revealings or their sublime self-intuition ([Greek: autopsia])? He had his own separate tragedy also. And when with his last words he requested that a cock be sacrificed to Æsculapius, that, reader, was to indicate that to him had come the eighth day of the drama, in which the Great Physician brings deliverance,--and in the evening of which there should be the final unveiling of the eyes in the presence of the Great Hierophant!
Such were the Eleusinia of Greece. But what do they mean to us? We have already hinted at their connection with the Sphinx's riddle. It is through this connection that they receive their most general significance; for this riddle is the riddle of the race, and the problem which it involves can be adequately realized only in the life of the race. To Greece, as peculiarly sensitive to all that is tragical, the Sphinx connected her questions most intimately with human sorrow, either in the individual or the household.
"Who is it," thus the riddle ran, "who is it that in the morning creeps upon all-fours, touching the earth in complete dependence,--and at noon, grown into the fulness of beauty and strength, walks erect with his face toward heaven,--but at the going down of the sun, returns again to his original frailty and dependence?"